The life and times of an Asian American activist who tells all the truth (and dishes news and analysis) but with a leftwards slant.

Monday, October 22, 2007

Richard Scaife's downfall

Like many Republicans whose foibles lay in the bedroom, Richard Mellon Scaife fell prey to some trailer park trash in a scuzzy hotel.

Who is Scaife, you might ask? He is the "vast right-wing conspiracy" that Hillary Clinton alluded to during her and Bill's dark days. Unlike some prominent pundits who can't get their names in the press for batshit ideas like a "handful of people who hate America . . . are losing their homes today," this mega-wealthy billionaire bankroller of the "Republican Revolution" and the Heritage Foundation is happiest behind the scenes and with his name out of the papers.

Though he jousts, indirectly, with public figures, Scaife seems to detest attention. He almost never speaks to the media, and on one of the few occasions he did, it was to tell a reporter, who'd sandbagged him on the street, that she was ugly and that her mother was ugly, too. (WaPo)

Too bad for him, the WashPost wrote about it, dailykos is spreading his name around in the mud, and well, I'm all too happy to inform even more people.

Richard Mellon Scaife is one of the most influential men in America who you've never heard of - heir to the vast Mellon fortune (banking, oil, and aluminum,) he helped fund Nixon's infamous Watergate project, the the smearing of President Bill Clinton.

Well, this upright citizen has gone and decided to sleep around on his wife, and with a former prostitute named Tammy Sue Vasco. What can we say? The man has the same kind of tastes has Bill? Scaife's biggest mistake? Not getting a pre-nup, and his wife, the understandably pissed Margaret "Ritchie" Scaife is raking it in to the tune of $725,000 per month in alimony.

Check out why she's pissed:

At some point in late 2005, Ritchie started having suspicions about her husband and hired a private investigator named Keith Scannell, a specialist in high-end surveillance for insurance companies. In December of that year, Scannell followed Richard Scaife to nearby North Huntingdon, home of Doug's Motel, a place where the TVs are bolted to the furniture and rooms can be rented in three-hour increments, for $28.. . . Why a billionaire would shack up at Doug's Motel, of all places, is a mystery. Ditto his choice of companions. Vasco is a tall, blond 43-year-old mother who in 1993 was busted in a sting operation after showing up at a Sheraton hotel and offering to have sex with an undercover cop for $225, the Post-Gazette reported.

Tawdry, dude, tawdry. How can a man like this blame Bill Clinton for slumming, when he's bagging tricks in fleabag motels?!? Plus, he then abducted his former wife's dog, in a move worthy of the cheesiest soup operas:

The real fight, though, was not over the Shreve & Co. finger bowls. It was over the dog. Specifically, a yellow Labrador retriever named Beauregard, who Ritchie has told friends is a direct descendant of a pooch belonging to a king of England. Until March 2006, the animal was in Ritchie's hands, living with her and the Pietragallos. Then one day, Beauregard was scooped out of the Pietragallos' back yard and whisked around the corner, to Richard's house on Westminster.

This brazen canine abduction was not covered up. Quite the opposite. It was celebrated with a banner on wooden stakes posted on Richard's front lawn: "Welcome home, Beauregard," it read.

It's safe to assume that despite his lineage, Beauregard is unable to read. The point, it seems, was to needle Ritchie.

And it did.

On the afternoon of April 6, 2006, Ritchie stopped her car when she spotted a housekeeper of Richard's walking Beauregard in the neighborhood. Game on. The cops later said that Ritchie punched 51-year-old Sue Patterson, then tried to grab the dog. A secretary of Richard's, 77-year-old Genevieve Still, saw Ritchie and Patterson on the ground, with Ritchie on top, pulling Patterson's hair. When she tried to intervene, Still wound up with "a swift kick to the lower back," she told police. Then a security guard named Dennis Bradshaw got in on the action and took a slap to the head, which reportedly broke his glasses.

Dude still is keeping the dog, which is just low. Don't you know the pooch's royalty?!? Well, let's just say it threw more fuel on Ritchie's desire to go after Scaife (the dog-napping jerk.) So that's a lil bit less money going to Scaife's favorite causes, as listed by wikipedia:

Through contacts made at Hoover and elsewhere, Scaife became a major, early supporter of the Heritage Foundation, which has since become one of Washington's most influential public policy research institutes. Later, he supported such varied conservative and libertarian organizations as: